Things are hotting up as the monstrous proposed development is not only set to destroy 800 hectares of lovely countryside in the George area between Glentana and Herold’s Bay, it will also use an extraordinary 5 million litres of water a day, in an area where the stuff is in desperately short supply, so a lot of people are very firmly against it.

Yes or no? It's decision time for the giant LagoonBay project.

Motorists are getting ripped-off and nobody seems to care; the big cost of owning a car is not in the purchase price, but hidden away in some obscure clauses demanding that your high-end vehicle (in this case Mercedes Benz) must be serviced by an “authorised dealer” and that that Special Part – be it fuse, bulb or spare key – must only be bought through one of these dealerships at an always-over-inflated price.

Angry Cape Town neighbours are in a froth over the Chinese Consulate next door. Giovanni Lorenzi has first-hand experience of the Jekyll and Hyde nature of the world’s latest superpower.

Lorenzi and his family have lived in the Cape Town suburb of Fernwood, close to Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens for 12 years and, although they were very happy at first, the past four or five years have been a nightmare. That’s because the Chinese government has been building the mother-of-all-consulates right next door to Lorenzi’s rather lovely Tuscan pile.

For years, strip clubs have been duping Home Affairs. To save money on permits for their foreign erotic dancers, they call them “workers”, whereas it is the women who have to pay the clubs that exploit them.

Home Affairs issue the clubs with corporate permits, allowing them simply to apply for a Worker’s Authorisation Certificate for each of the hundreds of strippers, mainly Eastern European, they bring into the country for three-month spells to “dance” at their venues. Abuse of the employment legislation is bare-faced cheek.

Judgment

Arabesque Contract Dancer

Corporate Permit Directive (June 2008)

Immigration Directive (June 2007)

Mavericks Dancers Rules

Mavericks Rules

Teazers Contract

Medical aid uses technical loophole to squirm out of paying for life-and-death operation. "There when you need us most", is the reassuring slogan used by Compcare Wellness – but sadly for the Duarte family, it has proved an empty promise in their darkest hour. In a case which is literally a matter of life or death, the medical insurer has given them the cold shoulder, refusing to pay, on an outdated technical point.

Although Moccasin Footwear CC of Pietermaritzburg technically belonged to Shireen Sookgreep, her husband, Yusuf Essa, was the person who ran things. It was a pretty typical SME – a small factory, a staff of 40, and a loan of R1.5 million from the a self-financing Independent Development Corporation (IDC), the state-owned national development finance institution that provides financing to entrepreneurs and businesses.

But on 26 October 2002 something decidedly atypical happened – the entire factory burnt down. Essa did what one does in such circumstances; he submitted an insurance claim, but instead of paying up on the claim the insurers put the boot in.

When the inflated cost of conveyancing comes up for debate, lawyers have successfully argued, time and again, that they both deserve and need to be allowed to monopolise the business.

If you've ever yearned to unleash the dogs of law on the high-street moneylenders, forget it it: the legal beagles will never bite the hand that feeds.

Victory for Vuyo (Vuyisile Zolani) Matu, the “eager to learn” school pupil from Katlehong who leapt over a first-floor balcony fleeing an abusive teacher, and whose injuries resulted in the amputation of his right leg (nose121). The Gauteng education MEC has been ordered to pay him R2.82 million in damages, with interest and costs.

The war of attrition between reputed billionaire David Brouze and his estranged wife, Karen, has gone yet another round in the courts. This time David has been accused of “kidnapping” their two-ye ...

Two of the shopping malls developed by the controversial Theodosiou brothers – with no proper planning approval – are about to be auctioned off by the liquidators.

Their biggest creditor, Absa Bank, is bracing itself for a massive loss.

Pity Ursula Smith, the legal secretary who had the temerity to take on her former employer, giant legal firm Eversheds. We reported that Ursula was awarded R78,000 by the CCMA in a “default judgment” after complaining of constructive dismissal. Eversheds failed to pay up by the deadline of December 15. Then, in February, Ursula received a curt SMS from the CCMA instructing her to attend a new arbitration hearing on March 4.

MTN’s decision to appoint Umbutho Civil and Electrical CC (nose134) as the firm that would oversee the R510-million construction project of its hubs in Worcester, East London and Kimberley – seemingly because the name of the firm’s owner, Diau April Mokoena, did not suggest any melanin deficiency (unlike, say, a Murray, or a Roberts) – had backfired somewhat.

Veteran personal injury attorney Ronald Bobroff, former president of the Law Society of the Northern Provinces and present arbiter of good taste and probity as a member of its ethics and rules committee, has launched a vitriolic attack on rival specialist lawyers,  on his firm’s website.

SENSITIVE READERS SHOULD REFRAIN FROM READING THIS LINGUISTIC EXERCISE

For a laugh, here’s a bit of history you’re not likely to find in any other South African news medium. It starts most unpromisingly as a meeting (at the University of Port Elizabeth in 1997) of the Language Commission for Afrikaans – Taal Kommissie – of the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns. That is the gathering of worthies who determine the “standard” or correct spelling and usage of Afrikaans.

Two factors lent great promise to the occasion: the chairman was the delightful Professor of Linguistics from Stellenbosch, Johan Combrinck, and on the agenda for that day’s meeting was the word fok.